Made a mess of my Gen 8. Raid and storage pool help

[Tobes]

Hi,

So I love my Gen 8. Running WS 2019 and it's mainly a media/plex box and has some archive files on it. It's been a project that has grown over time and as such the storage is all over the place. Physically it has:

120GB SSD (Windows)
3 TB WD Red
6 TB Seagate
4 TB WD Red
4 TB WD Red

They were all setup on individual RAID 0 arrays. So first mistake there.
Second issue I have cause myself is one of the 4TBs ran out of space so I setup a storage pool to expand it. I should have done some more reading up on this as I'm not really sure how a storage pool treats data. (Is a storage pool the same as storage spaces?)

I have disabled and pulled one of the drives out that made up part of the storage pool (then replaced with the 6TB drive). I don't know how the data is handled and if I should be missing files or if I am going to encounter corrupt files?

That's not really the help I need though. Really I need to get a RAID setup and I'm looking for advice as to how I should proceed. I know I should probably buy another drive so perhaps another 4TB to replace the 3TB? Then have the 3 drives in RAID 5? That give me 8 TB (RAID) and 6 TB (Seagate) of usable space.

Then I'm stuck with the issue of moving that data. I guess I need to move it off somewhere to be able to move it back after the RAID is configured. So the reality is I need storage to move it across to. So do I just buy new larger drives?

I use Windows Server Backup to back up just my main Windows drive. Windows backup insists on a dedicated drive to backup to. Is there anyway around this or any free alternative to backup this drive automatically?

I don't know where to start really. I have come to accept that I will have to drop some money down on drives. Can anyone just tell me what I should do!

 

[bledd]

If you're mixing drives like this..

Either wipe it all and use Unraid or install Stable it Drivepool on your server, it handles disks in a much nicer way than Storage Spaces.

 

[Webzta]

If you're mixing drives like this..

Either wipe it all and use Unraid or install Stable it Drivepool on your server, it handles disks in a much nicer way than Storage Spaces.

I use stablebit it's great.

 

[whiskycycle]

If you're mixing drives like this..

<snipped> wipe it all and use Unraid <snipped>

I'd do this to be honest... best change I ever made with a bunch of mixed drives in a couple of Gen8 Microservers. 6TB drive as the parity drive and the others in the pool, would give 11TB useable based on the other drives, and the 120GB as a cache drive. I'd probably think about changing that 120GB to a 1TB SSD or larger if possible though, makes it much happier for caching large amounts of data to write to the pool.

 

[Trig]

Stablebit's stuff is spot on as is their support, the fact that you can just pull drives and get data off them and theres no encryption or bespoke FS tinkering has saved me before..

 

[bremen1874]

I'd probably think about changing that 120GB to a 1TB SSD or larger if possible though, makes it much happier for caching large amounts of data to write to the pool.

Or try it without a cache drive. I removed my cache drive because I needed it for something else. I found that I could still read/write fast enough over a gigabit connection and I don't have to worry about filling the cache.